Higher education for sustainable development in the humanities and social sciences: Opening the black box.

The starting point of this project is the observation that lecturers in the humanities and social sciences adopt knowledge and approaches from other disciplines in teaching Higher Education for Sustainable Development (HESD) courses. More specifically, HESD in the humanities and social sciences makes use of interdisciplinary scientific research as well as interdisciplinary perspectives on root causes of sustainability problems. They do so in order to instill action competence in students: their capacity for envisioning, and acting upon, alternative ways of development. Whereas this observation is often taken at face value in the literature, it is very scarcely researched from the lecturer’s point of view. This project wants to open this underinvestigated ‘black box’ of HESD lecturing based on insights from educational, philosophical and social sciences.

Starting from a comprehensive approach towards sustainability (in line with the Unesco Sustainable Development Goals), the project first charts how lecturers deploy knowledge of other disciplines in teaching HESD courses. Secondly, the project investigates the particular perspectives on root causes of sustainability problems these lecturers convey to their students and, thirdly, the guiding principles used in enhancing action competence in HESD courses are explored. In order to do so, a three-wave Delphi study with humanities and social sciences lecturers from the KU Leuven will be effectuated. Based on the obtained empirical findings, the project aims to develop a theoretical framework that takes into account the full complexity of teaching sustainability issues within HESD. The framework will furthermore identify areas where (possible) tensions, challenges as well as inconsistencies of lecturers’ teaching practices in the humanities and social sciences are present, and valorize these findings by identifying and elucidating how lecturers can design HESD courses that educate students for our future world.